By Lynn Marie Macy

Directed By Amber Miller

The Blue Room Theatre is proud to present, Northanger Abbey the latest play by Lynn Marie Macey March 13-29 running every Thursday, Friday and Saturday and one Sunday performance March 23, all shows are at 7:30pm. In this theatrical adaptation of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, the theme of the peril of confusing life and art is revisited with surprising results.

Austen’s novel was written in 1798 as a fierce parody of the late 18th century gothic style's fainting heroines, 'terror' (giving hints of something fantastic but dreadful, only to quash it later with mundane truth) and haunted medieval buildings. Austen venomously targeted Ann Radcliffe's extremely popular The Mysteries of Udolpho by creating characters reading and mimicking the swoons of the gothic novel. Northanger Abbey itself concerns a typical Austen heroine, the young Catherine Morland who is taken to the fashionable resort of Bath with her friends the Allens. From there she travels to the eponymous medieval abbey, the seat of the Tilneys. As an impressionable girl, Catherine becomes obsessed with the possible atrocities going on at Northanger Abbey, inspired by Radcliffe's novel. As ever, Austen cannot resist injecting a little romance into proceedings and she puts Captain Tilney under the spell of the unpleasant, scheming Isabella Thorpe.

In her whimsical adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel, Macy opens the play Northanger Abbey with our heroine, Catherine (Alice Wiley-Pickett), thirsting for adventure and romance which she satisfies in her obsessive reading of The Mysteries of Udolpho. Incidents from the novel, as replayed in Catherine's vigorous imagination are woven into the comparatively placid, but no less eventful, incidents of Catherine's real life. The result is a delicious Wizard of Oz-like journey through Catherine's two worlds, culminating in her unexpected visitation to the mysterious estate, Northanger Abbey.